High speed document processing equipment, such as that used to process checks and other financial documents, automatically reads data from the documents, performs financial transactions, updates or records the documents and the transactions, and sorts the documents for storage or physical transport. Magnetic ink character readers have been particularly effective in such equipment. The magnetized characters are easily differentiated from the variety of other printed matter appearing on such documents. The use of highly stylized characters further accentuates the uniqueness of the magnetic ink characters.
In such equipment it is essential that each document be individually processed. Automatic separators, even working at very high efficiency will occasionally pass two or more superimposed documents. Multiple document detectors are employed to ensure that automatic processing is performed on single documents.